In October 2016, Calcbench was delighted to attend a panel discussion at the Corporate Reporting Users Forum (CRUF), held in New York at the offices of Morgan Stanley.

At that meeting, a particularly noteworthy item was brought up by Simon Flannery of Morgan Stanley: he said it would be great if “firms filed their 10-Q within a day or two” of publishing their earnings releases.

That’s a good idea, we thought. So we examined the publishing behavior of firms around the quarter end, the Form 8-K earnings press release, and the publishing of the 10-Q. You can read that work in our blog post from that time.

Now we offer an update to that analysis here.

What We Found

We examined filings from January 2017 through April 30, 2018. The numbers of filings examined are in the table below:

For annual reports, we listed the average number of days from period end to earnings press release as (you guessed it) Days to 8-K. The next column is the same measurement for period end to annual report filing. It implies, on average, a roughly 10 to 11-day lag time in both 2017 and 2018.

In the quarterly report analysis you see a roughly 3 to 4-day delay.

Next we looked at SEC filer categories to get a more precise view of the data. As would be expected, larger firms (which typically have larger financial reporting teams and practices) are faster than the average firm. Large filers usually go about 45 days from the end of their fiscal year to the 8-K earnings release; and another 12 days after that until the 10-K is public — for a total of 57 days from end of fiscal year to 10-K filed.

The 10-Q filing times follow a similar pattern: 30 days from quarter end until 8-K, and then another four days until the 10-Q is released.

* 2018 quarterly filings are currently a small sample size.

Given the data above, we compiled a list of “Fast S&P500 Filers” — those firms that filed earnings releases within 30 calendar days of their fiscal year-end date and their 10-Ks within 15 days after that. (Both 2018 and 2017 filings are in the list.)